Little-known museum a 15-year labor of love

He toils in obscurity and often in costume, trying to share history, not his story. Chuck Ambers doesn’t much care if people know all about him.

What he wants people to know can be found behind the walls of Casa del Rey Moro, the tiny, no-frills museum he opened in Old Town 15 years ago and crammed with displays and artifacts not often mentioned in textbooks or popular culture.

Think you know who shaped San Diego or California or the United States? You might think again after spending an hour or two with Ambers in his museum. The 70-year-old former Chula Vista schoolteacher will talk until closing time if you let him.

In grade school, local children learn that the first European to discover San Diego was Juan Cabrillo. Ambers wants them to know that some of the conquistadors on the boat had African blood.

Gold put Julian on the map in 1869. Ambers makes sure museum visitors know that the man who first found it was Fred Coleman, a former slave.

“We haven’t been told the full story,” Ambers said.

Telling the full story of the African-American experience — and the African-Spanish and the African-Mexican — puts Ambers in the middle of a nationwide push to better preserve black history and culture.

Just as epic events like World War II and the Holocaust eventually passed from tragedy to reflection to academic study, the civil rights movement is getting its due, with major museums under way in Washington, D.C, Atlanta, Charleston, S.C., and Jackson, Miss.

The one in Washington, slated to open in 2015 as the Smithsonian’s 19th museum, will be a 374,000-square-foot showpiece expected to draw more than 3 million visitors a year. Oprah Winfrey donated $12 million to it last month, saying, “I am so proud of African-American history and its contributions to our nation as a whole.”

In his own way, Ambers was ahead of the curve, and behind it. He’s the first to admit he’s not much of an administrator or fundraiser. He’s always been more interested in assembling his museum than promoting it or making it look fancy.

That may be changing. He’s formed a nonprofit organization to run Casa del Rey Moro. He’s looking for successors who can take what he’s started and expand it, give it more structure and sparkle. And, most important to him, give it a future.

“This will not die with me,” he said.

A teacher first

Ambers grew up in Detroit. In 1965, when a physician there named Charles Wright turned a house he owned into a fledgling African-American museum, the Ambers family was among its first members. The Wright museum is now one of the largest in the nation.

“That’s what gave me the audacity to think I could run a museum,” Ambers said.

He came to San Diego County to attend MiraCosta Community College and play basketball. Eventually he earned a bachelor’s degree from what is now Point Loma Nazarene University in the early 1970s and a master’s and a teaching credential at what is now Alliant University.